If you watched the episode last night, you know that Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey) was killed, by mistake, at the hands of Titus, her second in command. This happened after his hatred for Clarke (Eliza Taylor) got the best of him and he set out to kill her, but instead a bullet went into Lexa.

“When we started the season, I had these two sort of separate big stories… I really wanted there to be a point at which the two collided,” showrunner Jason Rothenberg told EOnline after the episode had aired. “In terms of grounder mythology, back in season two, Lexa and Clarke had this conversation about reincarnation and how in the grounder world, that’s how leaders were chosen. I didn’t want to just say that was not true, but I also didn’t want to say it was a real sort of spiritual reincarnation, so I then sort of struck upon this notion of a technological reincarnation. Once I struck upon that idea, then I kind of knew that in order to deal with reincarnation, you would have to die first.”

He added, “So it became this incredibly sad thing because I love Alycia Debnam-Carey. She’s incredible, but we definitely also were factoring in the idea that we have an actor that was starring in another show. As it was, I had to sort of beg borrow and steal to get her for this season as much as we were lucky enough to get her. So in weighing all those factors, it just became clear.”

So…how will Clarke handle all of this?

“Her heart is broken, and yet she needs to balance and find a way as always to go forward as an important leader of her people. Right now, they’re locked in that room. But if you think about politically what the death of Lexa does is throws any sort of sense that Skaikru is going to be protected even if they get rid of Pike out the window, because who knows what the next commander’s going to want to do,” he explained, adding, “Is the next commander going to follow Lexa’s nonviolence path, the blood must not have blood path, or is the next commander going to do what Titus wanted all along, which is to wipe them out? And this is something that Clarke is now going to have to navigate from Polis when the story picks back up.”